George R. R. Martin's writing revelations point to new tools for authors

Charles Wright

Wordsmith: The day WordStar 4.0 stops working is the day I retire, says Game of Thrones author George R.R. Martin.

Novelist George R. R. Martin shocked a lot of readers a couple of weeks ago when he revealed to TV host Conan O’Brien that he does all his work on a 1980s MS-DOS computer, using a long-defunct word processor called Word Star 4.0. The thought that such a gripping, inconceivably dense, seven-novel epic as A Song of Ice and Fire (so far we’ve only seen the first five) could be hammered out on a long-discarded operating system and creaky, keyboard-oriented, command-line-driven software from the era of dot-matrix printers, completely insulated from the internet, was all but inconceivable to generations raised in the era of icons and touch-screens. Somehow, those remaining two novels, already long delayed, suddenly seemed distinctly at risk.Game of Thrones fans might have been even more alarmed had they read Martin’s blog, somewhat typically called ‘‘Not a Blog’’ (bit.ly/SRvKIl), which is put together on a second Windows PC using Microsoft LiveJournal. ‘‘I don’t like puzzling out these stupid little cartoons they call icons, or dragging them around with a mouse,’’ the author declared in one post. ‘‘The day Word Star 4.0 stops working is the day I retire.’’ Word Star 4.0 was first released more than 27 years ago, with a fine contempt for the mouse, or, for that matter, disk directories and automatic reformatting of text changes. It requires the user to memorise keyboard commands (Ctrl-PP to print, Ctrl-RW to remove a word, Ctrl-RS to delete a sentence). Once you learn Word Star’s command structure, you can rattle out the words at quite a clip. But for Martin to describe it as the ‘‘Duesenberg of word-processing systems – very old but unsurpassed’’ seems quite a stretch. It showed just how attached writers can get to their tools of trade. As Martin was explaining his contempt for features that the average word-processor user regards as an absolute necessity, we were playing around with a writing tool that is the very antithesis of Word Star. The British developers of Scrivener, which costs $US40 (bit.ly/1bOQ0iN) and works on Macs and more recently Windows – although the Windows version hasn’t quite caught up yet with all the Mac features – describe it as a content-generation tool, but it’s more than that. If you look through the case studies of users (bit.ly/1k0hAA6), or the ‘‘Zen of Scrivener’’ section on the busy online forum, populated by a highly active, substantial community of helpful users, it emerges as a creative cocoon for anyone who wants to turn their thoughts and ideas into words. Scrivener has a set of tools that allow novelists, scriptwriters, non-fiction writers, journalists, students – indeed anyone engaged in any form of writing, and particularly long-form writing – to plan, research, write and export the most complex piece of work in a variety of formats, including those for the most common ebooks. It can accommodate any of the common techniques that writers use to construct characters and plots. It can turn out index cards and storyboards, outlines, character sketches – it can suggest names for them too – allowing you to switch between the most simple or detailed views as it suits. You can pin pictures up on its virtual corkboard, and link to them in the manuscript for quick access. Its full-screen writing mode somehow invites the user to fill the screen with words. And at every stage, it makes sure everything is backed up and secure. It can even track word count targets. One feature it lacks, however, is a detailed timeline. But thanks to a young Melbourne programmer, Matthew Tobin, there’s a solution called Aeon Timeline ($40 at scribblecode.com), which syncs with both versions of Scrivener. As best-selling author Elizabeth Haynes observes at bit.ly/1itmEHG, if you don’t keep an accurate timeline, stories can leak authenticity. So can court cases, which is why lawyers – and historians and other professionals who once struggled to keep track of events with Excel spreadsheets – are now happily tracking events and things such as the ages of characters and avoid putting them in two places at the same time, with Aeon Timeline. Tobin wrote an as yet unpublished novel using Scrivener, and he worked closely with its developers. He also picked up their attitude towards users. His blog and forum also include some helpful information for writers, including a series of chats with writers about their tools. None of them mentions Word Star 4.0.